Muscat de Lunel is an appellation for the naturally Sweet wines of the town of Lunel, on the eastern edge of the Languedoc region in Southern France. As the name suggests, these wines are made from one of the many varieties of Muscat Grapes - in this case, Muscat Blanc à Petits Grains. The grapes must have a sugar content of 252 grams per litre. Wine Alcohol is added to the grape must in a ratio of between 10:1 and 20:1.
The Final alcohol should be 15-18% by Volume. Although the wines are not as famous as those of Frontignan, the town of Lunel is sometimes known as the "Cité de Muscat". As with many small appellations in the south of France, the production of Muscat de Lunel is dominated by a cooperative. There are also half a dozen private producers.
The focus of the symposium, unsurprisingly, was on the challenges posed by climate change. As if to illustrate the immediacy of the threat, the symposium took place during a heatwave, with temperatures of over 40°C in Bordeaux and extreme weather events recorded across the coountry: parts of southwest France saw violent storms and winds of 112kph on the evening of 20 June, while vineyards across the Médoc and St-Emilion were damaged by hailstones ‘the size of golfballs’. As Olivier Bernard of D ...
I’d like to say we took advantage of the lockdown and its related commotion to do a stock-take, explore new avenues, turn over intriguing stones, widen and deepen our drinking, taking careful notes as we went. Sadly, no. I won’t say we got stuck in a rut, but we did tend to stick with comfort wines – and “comfort”, in our case, means familiar. Regular readers of this quarterly column can probably guess the labels on the resulting empties. We have a wider range of comfort foods, I’m afraid, than ...
The Roussillon is home to a range of wine styles, at varying price points. Sweet fortified wines (vin doux naturel) used to dominate production, with still dry wines (vin sec) in the minority. In the last 30 years, however, this has completely changed, and vin sec now makes up the majority (80%) of the Roussillon’s output. The recent Wines of Roussillon tasting, held in London, not only highlighted many good quality dry wines being produced, but also cemented the idea that Roussillon whites are ...
